Adventures in Low-Iodine Life (or Theo Take Me Away!)

As you know, the first night of the diet Calypso brought home forbidden desserts.  There have been other "fun" moments.

A few days later she brought me penne a la vodka.  Also forbidden due to the butter and cream involved, though I can have all the booze I want on this diet and may soon start drinking heavily.

I decided to keep busy by going through old magazines to get rid of.  May I just say Cooking Light is the new porn when on a restrictive diet.

The next morning I woke up in a cold sweat because I thought I'd sabotaged my treatment after dreaming of eating salty french fries topped with crumbled bacon followed by peaches covered with a very buttery streusel.  It was the yummiest nightmare I've ever had though.

Lest you think Calypso is the only family member hoping to be choked with dry matzo crackers (which are permissible to me) allow me to correct you.  During the planning stages of the menu I asked Mr. Lime and Isaac for dinner recipes they were hungry for in terms of trying to figure out whether or not they were recipes I could easily adapt.  After Mr. Lime suggested about a dozen things with dairy as the main component I asked him if he had been present during the extended instruction the doctor gave about this diet.  He admitted he had zoned out intentionally "because it was too complicated."

The tacos in question with hella good pico

Then Diana came home to visit for the weekend.  She and Isaac decided they wanted to go out to eat rather than stay home and partake in low iodine food....this after I gave them the last of the black bean tacos with pico de gallo I had made for dinner the night before...the tacos that took me ridiculous amounts of effort to prepare thus leaving me none for lunch the next day.  My darling children went to a restaurant where I could not hope to find something suitable to eat.  Then Diana came buzzing back into the house and asked for money out of MY wallet to finish paying their bill because Isaac took his wallet but not money and she had some cash but not enough and had left her debit card at home (how convenient).  Let me get this right, you're going to eat the last of the food I can safely eat, then go out to a place where I can't possibly eat, THEN ask for MY money to pay for part of it?  She nodded sheepishly.  You so owe me, kid.


This past weekend we had unexpected house guests.  They were dear friends from Trinidad we hadn't seen in many years so we welcomed the chance to see them even though the circumstances leading to their extended stay were, shall we say, less than optimal and the original hosts for them need to be flogged.  They brought along with them their own dietary restrictions in the form of a diabetic and a celiac patient.  Yes, I managed to cook tasty meals which met EVERYONE'S requirements...And then we had a 10 hour power outage so we went out to eat.  My dietary low point came when I sat with everyone at the restaurant as various table mates ate eggs, pancakes, and buttered toast.  My plate contained applesauce and fried potatoes with nothing but pepper because that's all the menu had that met my requirements.  Trust me, I read the entire menu.  NOTHING else would have been permissible.  It was depressing.

Now I've done a fair bit of complaining about food in this post but it's to set you up to understand my happiness over the one bit of dietary joy I have been able to indulge in during this period of frustration.  I mentioned before that I have found exactly one brand of chocolate bar I am allowed to enjoy because it contains no dairy and no soy lecithin.  Read your labels.  Soy lecithin is in every other freaking brand of chocolate I've looked at and I've looked at a LOT of chocolate.  Maybe there are some other brands out there but if so they aren't available in my area.

So I bought myself some bars of Theo chocolate to sustain myself for the weeks of deprivation while I prepare to nuke any remaining cancer cells and burn them into oblivion so cancer is a thing that I will hereafter refer to in the past tense.  I've had Theo before and it's yummy stuff.  I was also aware that it was non-GMO (because I don't need my chocolate to have some weird gene splicing going on and exposing me to other crazy health risks, cancer is quite enough, thanks), organic (ditto the previous comment), fair-trade (so I don't have to worry that some little kid in Africa was slaving away involuntarily rather than going to school so I can get my cacao fix), and as chocolate goes it's pretty low in sugar (so you can eat the dark varieties and tell yourself it's health food...trust me...I've read all sorts of studies about the benefits of dark chocolate).  It made me happy that an ethical and tasty product was still available during my dietary exile from the land of yum.  It made me happy enough that I left a comment on the company website telling them how much I appreciated this bit of joy their product allows me.

This is the part where they won me as a loyal customer for the rest of what I intend to be a long life.  Within a day I received separate emails from two different employees telling me how much they appreciated my message and how glad they were I was a satisfied customer.  They were personal notes which included the offer of some coupons to keep my stash supplied AND kind wishes for my well-being.   A few days later the coupons arrived, not with a form letter but with a nice old-fashioned, hand-written, personal letter. Check it out.  So Tiffany, Becca, and anyone else from Theo, if you're reading, thanks again for being an all around terrific company which provides a great product and treats its customers well.

For the sake of my friends and loyal readers here, who have seen a reference to a particular actor being covered in a particular confection innumerable times, I guess the next question is....do you guys have any pull with Hugh Jackman?  Could you convince him to show up at my house wearing some melted Theo? No?  Ok, well I'm off to savor a bit of 85% dark and some daydreams...